Sub-questering

One of the things we love about adventure games and RPGs both new and old are the sub-quests that add to the narrative of the main quests you’re on, whether it arcs over what you’re currently doing or the big picture of the entire game.

One of the game’s sub quests involves D’arc observing some missing persons posters - townspeople who fell victim to the wasteland, monster attacks, foul-play, and other assorted calamities.
Better yet, if you missed out on the chance to become an Evoker, now you can become a Necromancer! For $450, we will put your likeness on a missing persons’ OR a wanted poster around town, which will be seen up close when D’arc examines them! You’ll also get to work with us to determine the circumstances for your going MIA, or why Iginor’s guards want you in the slammer.

We also have room for an expanded role in this quest… a featured poster that will be assembled in your inventory and used to solve a central game quest. For $500, your mug will go on this poster! But it's limited to just one backer, so get it before it goes missing forever!

Another facet of adventure game design to overcome an obstacle, or just for fun, is the implementation of minigames. A great deal of the challenges within Mage’s Initiation require lateral thinking, and thinking outside of the box. There are multiple solutions to many puzzles, which depending on your chosen class and how you choose to approach the situation will affect how some things turn out for you in the already-planned sequels.

Minigames are often implemented in adventure games in place of the traditional building puzzles, deductive reasoning puzzles, and dialog-based puzzles to spice things up for the player and give them a different type of mental stimulation. A true adventure game shouldn’t be comprised entirely of minigames (which seems to be a fault of many games marketed as “adventure” today), but a well-placed and memorable minigame or two definitely enriches the experience and sometimes even makes you save at that point specifically just to play it again. (Ms. Astro Chicken, anyone?)

One particular minigame within Mage’s Initiation is Demon’s Deal, a card game of chance that you play at the tavern.
We decided to take the minigame aspect one step further, and gave Demon’s Deal physical (and very collectible) manifestation: introducing the Dabbler tier!

At $40 and higher (with the exception of the two all-digital tiers), a "Demon’s Deal" 63-card deck in a collectible debossed tin case! If you’ve already pledged higher than $40 at a physical reward tier, the deck will be automatically included in your treasure horde.

The card set will feature John-Paul Selwood’s amazingly detailed monster artwork, so they will definitely be a treat to look at. The cards will be printed on 310gsm black-core paper imported from Germany, so they’ll also be made to last!

With just a fortnight and a day left, we’d like to thank our amazing backers again, for persistently spreading the word about Mage’s Initiation: we need to amass more initiates! Spreading the word through blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, carrier pigeon, other Kickstarters (sans spamming) goes a long way towards helping us provide you with a bigger and more epic game!

Comments

Allright, we're slowly approaching 80K! I think the strech goals are nice, I just wish the Mac port was a little closer, like at 100K or something like that. But I have faith that maybe we'll get there anyway!

@Rob & Serena: The Evoker tier is essentially a static character sprite which stands around. The backer gets to have input on what their "look, interact, and talk" messages should be (lines are spoken by D'arc, not the backer). The Necromancer reward is much the same deal, except rather than a full body sprite, the backer's face appears on a missing/wanted poster. It'll be just a head shot, but larger and more detailed than the Evoker sprite. The Necromancer backers also get to have input regarding what their poster says when looked at and interacted with by D'arc (with look, interact, talk messages).

And Rob, the Demon's Deal rules are like a simplified version of Poker. We're still figuring out a few details, though. Currently, we're debating whether to add more levels of complexity to the game or keep it relatively simple...

Superbacker

Observation about the new $450 Necromancer reward, is that is feels like your getting less then the $400 Evoker slot, one picture (albeit close up) rather then a sprite with limited lines. Could be this will get better success if it's priced (a bit) lower then the Evoker. (which I note has opened up again).

I really like the card idea. I loved learning and playing 9 men's morris in Longbow (and most other mini games for that matter). Are the rules of Demon's Deal original and requiring these unique cards to play or is it more like a knock off of another card game, either classical or new. The card(s) look beautiful anyway, so it's temping just for that reason. Should bring people up from the lower tiers.